Joseph Wong The most expensive mistake in startups isn’t a bad hire or a missed fundraise. It’s building something nobody wants. I’ve done it. Most founders have. You spend 4 months building, launch to silence, and spend the next 2 months rationalising why the market isn’t ready yet. The market was ready. Your idea just wasn’t right. … Read more
I’ve made three genuinely bad hires. Not “didn’t work out” bad — properly bad. The kind where you spend 3 months managing a situation that should never have existed. Each one was different. Each one was avoidable. And looking back, each one had red flags I either didn’t see or chose to ignore. Here’s what … Read more
My first remote hire almost quit in week 2. Not because the role was wrong. Not because the pay was wrong. Because I had no onboarding plan. I sent them a laptop, added them to Slack, and pointed them at a Notion doc that hadn’t been updated in 4 months. By day 10 they were … Read more
I have no ops team. No EA. No chief of staff. What I have is a set of AI tools I’ve spent the last year testing, breaking, and refining into something that actually works for a founder running at speed. This is the full stack — what I use, why I use it, and what … Read more
Most founder pitch narratives start in the wrong place. They open with the problem, build slowly to the solution, bury the traction on slide 9, and by the time they get to why this is a big opportunity, the investor has already decided. I’ve sat across the table from enough investors to know: they make … Read more
Every founder I know has the same problem: they’re doing work that feels important but isn’t moving the needle. Status updates. Meeting summaries. Email triage. Weekly reports. It’s the tax on running a company — necessary, but not the reason you started one. I tracked my time for two weeks and found I was spending … Read more
I used to copy job descriptions from company careers pages I admired. Big mistake. Those companies are optimising for volume — thousands of applicants, large HR teams to filter them, and the luxury of time. You have none of those things. When you write a job post like a Fortune 500, you get Fortune 500 … Read more
Open a doc right now. Copy every prompt below into it. Save it somewhere you’ll actually find it. These five prompts do 80% of the hiring work I used to spend 8 hours a week on. I’ve tested every variation. These are the ones that survived. 1. The Job Post Prompt Use this every time … Read more
For eight months, I couldn’t find good people. I was running an HR SaaS startup — which, yes, is deeply embarrassing given what we do. We help companies hire smarter. And there I was, drowning in mediocre applicants, ghosting candidates by accident, and spending Sunday evenings rewriting the same job description for the fourth time. … Read more